HBO To Adapt Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half Novel To Limited Series

Deadline is reporting that HBO has won the rights for The Vanishing Half, the novel by Brit Bennett that is currently atop The New York Times bestseller list. HBO will adapt and develop it as a limited series. 

The novel focuses on the Vignes sisters, identical twins who, after growing up together in a small, southern black community, run away at age sixteen. It’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, hiding her identity from her husband, who knows nothing of her past. Even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

The novel was published on June 2, 2020 by Penguin Random House, and became a Good Morning America Book Club Pick, Barnes & Noble June Book Club Pick, and Amazon Best Book of June.

Bennett is a Stanford U grad whose debut novel The Mothers became a bestseller and is being developed as a feature film by Kerry Washington through Simpson Street and Natalie Krinsky for Warner Bros. Her essays are featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.